E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

The world has many divisions - one of them is between those who love the Olympics, and their idealism, and sporting opportunities for the youth of the world - and those who detest them, seeing mostly their propaganda value and their money-wasting potential.  Obviously, anyone in the second camp was going to be particularly indisposed to a winter games (the 22nd) held at a Russian resort in a land whose, shall we say democratic experiment (to be tactful) has yet to fully succeed (to be hopeful).  Many of these bitter commentators and protesters - often supporting the hard done by gay community in Russia, where to be gay is to be potentially killed or beaten - failed to see that Putin is not Stalin , and Russia is not Nazi Germany circa 1936.  Much more needs to be done in Russia, but it is not run by a madman who has published a book calling for genocide, nor does its society practise euthanasia of the mentally ill. Indeed, as the games reminded us, Russia, despite...

Have you seen many murderers in public?  I hadn't, until I saw Oscar Pistorius run, at the 2012 Summer Olympics, in London.  At the time, like almost everyone else in the stadium and by extension the world, I stood and cheered, marvelling at his speed, grace, courage and physical charisma.  He was the great blade runner, a hero to children and adults, and one of the major sporting figures of the age.  That was then - six months ago more or less.  Half a year makes a big difference. Now, the day after Valentine's Day, and the cruel irony is not lost on anyone, at only 26 years of age, he stands accused of murdering his girlfriend.  Given that she was a beautiful swimwear model and covergirl, and he a millionaire icon of the new South Africa, it is hard to imagine a more swift or cruel fall from national and international grace in terms of celebrity infamy - the fall is truly Olympian.  With four shots to the head and body, Oscar has go ne from a grea...

Eyewear 's belief in the 2012 London Olympics has been totally vindicated, not least by Jonathan Freedland and Blake Morrison , both writing lyrically in today's Guardian .  One of the greatest games ever held - and surely the fairest, with no teams boycotting and women represented as never before - it has showcased a bold, lively, upbeat, good Britain - filled with enthusiastic, celebratory people able to enjoy the successes of themselves and others.  The nay-sayers are wrong about the Olympics, and always were - its ideals are real, as are its golden gifts.  The Games inspire and reveal the best of ourselves - as competitors, as hosts and as audience.  I am proud to live in London, and to be on track to get British citizenship.  I have lived in London for 9 years now, and am happy to be here.  British people, too often sold short by their media and their bankers and their politicians - have risen to the occasion, and vaulted over the establishment to mak...

Eyewear was in the Olympic Stadium last night for the greatest show on earth - Usain Bolt 's run into history, as world's fastest man, redux.  First, let me say that if Britain was run like the Olympics we would all be better off - it was efficient, uniformly friendly, and upbeat.  Britain isn't broken, it just needs to rise to the occasion which it is doing for these games, splendidly.  Secondly, let me note that poetry is not as great as sport.  Hearing and seeing 80,000 people erupt in joy after Bolt ran is a corrective to the notion that poems just need to be clearer, or rhyme, or be in traditional forms, or funny, to "win an audience".  No, to win an audience these days, one needs to genuinely enthral, thrill and impress, with something astounding.  There is no sense of cheap faux celebrity about Bolt.  The greatness is in the doing, and the deed is heroic.  Finally, on the subject of Bolt's authenticity - God, let's hope there's no doping in...

The Olympics has gotten off to a strange start - a few days before the opening ceremony, which actually declares the games open, officially - games have been started - and North Koreans offended with Ali G levels of ignorance.  Inauspicious?  Best to wait for the starter's pistol.

The Olympics looms - it has always felt central to the Eyewear story, because the blog began just as the Olympics was announced for here, way back in July 2005 , 7 years ago (yes, this is our 7th year!).  And there is every chance it will be a great Games, and Team GB will do very well, perhaps coming in fourth in the medal tables.  However, the news today is more grim than that gold lining implies - the UK is in serious recession.  The economy has shrunk 4% in the last few years, and, according to the BBC analysis, this is now the worst financial crisis the UK has faced, outside of the war years, in the last hundred years - that is, worse than the Great Depression, or the 70s.  So, as Eyewear faces forward, it does so chastened, and concerned.  Yes, poetry matters, and yes, it needs to be published.  But the perilous state of the nation is of grave concern also, and overhangs other considerations.  Let us try to enjoy the remarkable hot sun, and mov...

There is now a year until the Olympics.  205 poets from all 205 competing nations will read their poems in London and tour Britain.  Simon Armitage will help judge which poets are to be selected.  Sounds good.

Last night, at Vancouver 2010, Sidney Crosby - now arguably the most important Canadian hockey player of all time, after, or even including, Wayne Gretzky - won the gold for Canada , in OT, in what could be claimed to be the most exciting and widely-watched hockey game of all time. Canada claims ice hockey as its own - though in truth, Americans and Russians have also dominated the sport over the years. But hockey's heart resides in Montreal, Toronto, and all points east and west. Canada's games have ended, but not without a bit of wry Canuck humour to water down the nationalism - Michael J Fox , William Shatner , and others added lustre, pathos and good cheer to a closing ceremonies that showed that what begins in tragedy, can end in comedy. I wish Great Britain and London all the best in their hosting of the summer games in 2012.

The rise of Canada as a force of nationalism to be reckoned with is underway with the BC games of 2010. The image of our victorious women hockey players chomping Sergeant Rock cigars on the ice, or our defiant brave and noble ice skater competing in the shadow of her mother's death, signal a new spirit, in a nation that is rich in natural resources, the arts, and had a relatively small banking crisis. Canada is one of the best countries in the world to live in - and its people are vigorous, enthusiastic, energetic, and proud. More than the sea and China is rising this century. So are we.

So it isn't just me, wee Canadian in Britain that I am, who has finally recognised, then recoiled from, the toxic bite of the endless, sinister snake that is the British media. Now the Vancouver Olympics chief has hit out at what Eyewear has been noting all week - a brutal and cynical news cycle of attacks, bent on downgrading a superb event, due to one tragic accident, and unseasonably warm weather (as if the English can keep their own weather under control either!). People in glass houses indeed - and what does this warn about the coming media storm in 2012? This sort of media approach has often sidelined and diminished poetry in the UK, too - because any thing based on love, enthusiasm and good news tends to ask to be kicked and trampled, apparently, by the kitten-bashing talking heads and journalists of these isles.

The problem with the media is that its function is the message - it needs news, and if it doesn't have a feed, will stir the pot to make one bubble up. So it is with the British media and Vancouver 2010. The ongoing demonisation of the games - the virtual garlanding with tragedy's albatross - stems largely from the fact that Team GB is not currently doing well in the medals table. I find it to be negligent to report more on a pre-games accident than on the fact that athletes from many nations are daily striving and winning in good faith and with alacrity and poise. The charge, made in the Independent the other day, that Canada's winter athletes have an unfair home advantage, having had more time than foreign competitors to train, is absurd - all host nations have such advantages - and, given Canada's only recently assuaged drought of home-won gold - it is a dubious advantage at that. The luge death was a terrible accident. It is true the poles were in a bad place,...

Canada's winter-discontent games are whizzing like a snowball with a rock in it. On the one hand, the opening ceremonies folded the Luge tragedy into the pomp like the end of Star Wars with Jacques Rogges solemnly ruling over his quasi-fictive utopia with emotive solidity; on the other hand, the rain has postponed events, Heil lost her golden moment, and Celine Dion didn't sing at the opening, where dysfunction kept some of the pillars slow to rise; on the other hand, KD Lang sang Cohen with genius and it was good to see the fiddle and Who Has Seen the Wind back in pride of place; on the other hand, the display of oil-rich Cannuck bravado was off putting - though what other nation (GB?) would place a slam champ on a pedestal to mouth stirring sub- Cicero corn? The rise of spoken word at the games confirms my Poetry Nation prediction of 12 years ago. Hopefully neither sleet nor Heil will slow the games as they slide on. The black arm bands are the lining of a silver games...

Eyewear is always pleased to hear Jimmy Page play guitar, and to see Beckham kick a football, but feels that there's something rotten in Britain when the tired tropes of umbrellas and red doubledecker buses are hauled out to pass on the visual and symbolic Olympic torch. Worse still, though, for London's handover moment (8 minutes of rock and roll and bland choreography), was the lack of imagination - instead of flights of fancy and wonder, such as China displayed (or Athens before it), we were offered the familiar image of urban celebrity - a jaded air, a fug, of louche backstage pass cynicism hungover the handover - as if the 2012 Olympics were just one more reunion tour for some aging stars. London, and by extension, the UK - can and will do better than this, I am sure. Few other nations possess so much visual and verbal dexterity - Rowling , for one, could offer tips on how to do magic. This sub- Herman's Hermits moment, of bus stop torpor, must be by-passed quickly...

Mr. Bolt is now one of the great, and most thrilling, Olympians - so it seems odd that the Olympics boss has chastised him for being too showy on the track. A bit like, yes, trying to keep lightning in a bottle, or accusing Mozart of using too many notes. While the world cheered, apparently, this dour pencil-pusher fumed. Anyway, given the overblown spectacle of the Olympics opening ceremonies, it seems like a Kubrick "war room" paradox to ask the great Jamaican sprinter to slow his antics down to a mediocre pace. So long as he respects the other competitors, he should be allowed to strut his stuff after crossing the finishing line - I suppose what galls the official is that Bolt is the first man in history to actually celebrate while competing, and still win.

Observers of Olympic coverage today on the BBC and ITV would have noted that one of the main stories - the story in fact - was that Britain is in third place in the medals table (counted in terms of number of golds) - ahead of Australia, in fourth place. Canada, it should be noted, is only in 17th place, at last count. At one point, a news commentator said that "all that mattered" was that Britain be "ahead of Australia". It is an undeniable truth that the British have several chief rivalries that keep them interested and on their toes: in sport, Australia (not least because of cricket, and rugby), in food and wine, France, and, in soft power, America (both nations vie for cultural-entertainment dominance, in such industries as publishing, film production, music, and the other arts). For Canadians, who are not included in these flattering, amicable and interesting tussles, much is lost. I have long felt that the lack of a dynamic cultural conversation - let alone a...

Not wanting to be a turncoat (I normally root for Team Canada) but the British team at these Olympics has been showing proverbial grit and determination - and, thankfully for female sport - showcasing the depth and quality of British women athletes. First, there was that gutsy road race the other day (and a long-needed gold medal for Wales, and the UK) from Cooke - and now, an incredible, and mostly unexpected triumph in the water, for women's 400m freestylers, Adlington and Jackson . Their race was so well-paced, and so team-oriented (both supporting the other) it could almost be the bespoke Olympic story - forget Phelps and his drive for massive amounts of gold, here were two unsung hardworking, big-hearted swimmers, who merely pulled excellence out of the bag when it was most needed. Well done! As an aside, it'd be nice if the BBC showed a few more competititors from other countries from time to time - the focus of all national broadcasters is obviously meant to be on the ...

Eyewear was there, yesterday, in London, as the Olympic torch began its marathon (and was it ever!) on foot, in Notting Hill. I was actually present for pro-Olympic purposes (My family has long been a believer in the Olympic spirit). Makers of video games will no doubt be musing on this one: 31-miles, dozens of bearers, thousands of cops - you be the protester and snuff the flame out! Or, as France put it, today's relay through Paris will see the flame protected as if "a visiting head of state" - in short, a symbol worth dying for. Or at least struggling against. This is dangerous territory - already, the attempts in London to blow the flame out with an extinguisher, or by knocking down anyone who carries it, have badly missed the mark. The Olympics are a movable feast - an ideal, and an event, larger than the host state, on any occasion. It isn't the Olympic flame that needs to be rekindled, or doused - but the actions of a particular government, that should be addr...

The Olympic torch - once a near-inextinguishable brand (or is that symbol?) of something good - is guttering in London . The culprit is China, whose recent brazen incarceration of a man whose chief crime seems to have been to critique obvious flaws in the system, is sadly obscuring the glory of the Olympian flames, with rather shady behaviour. Eyewear had hoped this would not be another 1936 - but it seems increasingly likely. China doesn't get it - it can't host a wonderful, open, world event, and also continue to be a bullying tyranny.

China has a problem that the world needs to help it solve. Or rather, call it a dilemma. They want two things presently, and in terms of cake, and eating it, it won't wash: on the one hand, they want to present a smooth-running impressive Olympic Games. On the other, they want to violently crush all (even peaceful) protest, including in Tibet . This isn't a matter of Western values being imposed - the Dalai Lama has spoken out about this latest spate of killing, and he is hardly a Western liberal, though he is friends with some. Instead, this is matter of some concern, for a great nation, with an immense history, and a genius for slow but gradual improvement. China needs to speed up its openness to free expression, and slow down its automatic hand that punishes whatever threatens its perceived best interests. Otherwise, the Tibetan crisis could easily derail its Olympics. The Nazi Olympics in Berlin, which was a horrific travesty, had some dissent in the shape of great African...